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Comment by pwaring | Hacker News Reader

The need for the GNU project and philosophy is still great, I'm not sure there's a need for the Hurd though. We already have a popular, well-supported (by companies and individuals) kernel which is available under the GPL (and another which is available under the BSD licence, which provides useful competition). I think it would be better if the GNU project put their full weight behind Linux rather than trying to work on their own kernel which isn't getting any traction.

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Linux has plenty of issues. It's more modular than it was it's a source-level monolith which means very poor support for old drivers that weren't merged into the tree for whatever reason. The recent tight coupling to systemd is making it much more so.

The HURD design was always more elegant, and should result in a more stable and secure system. That's absolutely a project worth pursuing.

Are you saying the Linux kernel will show issues if not running in cooperation with systemd? Where's the tight coupling?

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2014-May...

Got it, but that's systemd requiring the coupling not Linux (which I assumed you meant "the kernel"). If we're talking about distros, then yes, there is a very high coupling of the ecosystem to systemd. The kernel continues to be unaffected, mostly.

It should result in a more stable and secure system, however, it doesn't run on 64 bit chips... and runs on only a few pieces of 32 bit kit.

Hurd developer here. You are spot-on. The Hurd solves a problem today that Linux (and all the other monolithic systems) will never solve: Fault containment.

> The need for the GNU project and philosophy is still great, I'm not sure there's a need for the Hurd though. We already have a popular, well-supported (by companies and individuals) kernel which is available under the GPL (and another which is available under the BSD licence, which provides useful competition)

In 2017 or 2018 Microsoft releases "Microsoft Linux with containerized Office-by-wine-who-cares-how and selected applications available from the App Store"

Then Microsoft ships another version of Microsoft Linux and breaks user-space, breaks ABI, other libraries, and brings in encryption-which-only-runs-Microsoft-signed-libraries-and-tools and other hassles which is effectively a fork of Linux kernel + most other tools.

Microsoft becomes just like Apple - a leech on GNU and FOSS.

Confusion is total, people are working on "free you see but not free" software. "Well free for me, developer, my employer, not for you user."

What does Hurd do to solve that problem? It has the same licence as Linux, so Microsoft could release 'Microsoft Hurd' in the same way.

I'm pretty sure Hurd development is still limping along because individuals are interested in working on it, not because GNU is allocating resources that would otherwise be devoted to Linux.

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